Tuesday, April 3, 2012

New Englander

An
established author walks into a bookstore to do a reading from the first book
he has published in ten years. But no one has shown up to see him. Sound like a
writer’s nightmare? Or the set-up for a sad joke? It’s actually the premise of The Reader, a short story that is part
of Nathan Englander’s new collection What
We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. Englander’s protagonist experiences a Rip Van
Winkle moment that plays out over and over again: the world has passed him by
while he retreated to his room to write his novel and his readers have moved
on--save for a lone auditor who follows him from reading to reading.

The title story of Englander's collection pays homage to
Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

My
discovery of Englander’s work was one of those happy instances of one very
talented writer leading to another. At an informal event author Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin, Zoli, Dancer
) named Englander (his teaching colleague in the MFA program at Hunter
College) as one of his favorite authors. This led me to the New Yorker and the
story for which the collection is named. Combining a startling mix of orthodox
Jewish doctrine, pot smoking and the dynamics between spouses and friends,
Englander shows what happens when two couples spend an afternoon together in
suburbia playing a dangerous game of “what if”. What do I
like so much about Englander’s work? In contrast to much contemporary short fiction that I've read, things happen in his stories. Events
unfold in such a way that unsettling truths are revealed, issues of life and
death are confronted, degrees of guilt are examined, faith and loyalty are
tested. But there is also considerable humor in the stories and many of the central
characters display touching vulnerability.

A
few months ago I heard Englander speak as part of an inspired pairing at the
NYPL; he was interviewed by the impressive Sarah Jones,
a performer and playwright whose work recalls Anna Deveare Smith (though
perhaps with a lighter touch.) The issue of whether Englander, who describes himself
as “a God-fearing atheist”, considers himself to be a Jewish writer came up
that evening, as it has frequently in other venues. Englander prefers not to
adopt that term, but rather reports that his writing grows out of his personal
experience. In a lighter moment
Englander described his meeting with Philip Roth, in which the older writer
complained that Englander had not been punished enough for his sometimes
less-than-flattering portrayals of Jewish characters.

The
evening at the library felt a bit like crashing a family party. Englander’s
mother was in the front row, and various friends and relatives were scattered throughout the audience—including two young people in the row behind me. Englander greeted a number of them by name. One had the sense that the extended family might not
all agree with Englander’s secular world view, but that they had agreed to
disagree. You can watch a video of this lively interview here.

Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englanderdiscuss The New American Haggadah, their take on a traditional Passover prayer book. The Haggadah recounts, through prayer, song, and ritual, the extraordinary story of Exodus, when Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt to wander the desert for forty years before reaching the Promised Land. Safran Foer edited Englander's translation, and major Jewish writers and thinkers like Jeffrey Goldberg, Lemony Snicket, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, and Nathaniel Deutsch also provide commentary. It is designed and illustrated by the Israeli artist and calligrapher Oded Ezer.